After All, It’s Not Called “Dan in a Wildly Romantic Love Story.”

Crabby critics — presumably those without daughters — are finding Steve Carell’s new movie “Dan in Real Life” to be mawkish and improbable.

Touchstone

Steve Carell expressing anger. No wait, disappointment. Or is it remorse?

Cheerier critics — probably those with kids of their own, daughters or otherwise — are charmed and touched.

Count me among the latter group, but for a romantic comedy, this is proving to be a bit of a conflicted experience. “Rotten Tomatoes,” the web site that tracks movie reviews and assigns a percentage for those who found it either “fresh” or “rotten,” shows that out of 100 reviews, “Dan” is considered 62 percent “fresh. Among the critics “Rotten” considers the “cream of the crop” that percentage shrinks to just 58 percent, nearly a push.

Fair enough. There are some plot point holes, no doubt about it. But overall this is a sweet and poignant romance, refreshingly free of blow-dry beauties and stock stereotypes. When this family gets together at a house by the water, it isn’t a mansion, it’s a knockabout place with exposed wiring and ancient plumbing.

And by the way, there isn’t a fart joke or a cringe-inducing embarrassment in the hour and 39 minutes. When was the last time you left the theater wondering if there was a single swear word in the film? That doesn’t make a good movie, but it is still worth noting.

As Dan, Carell, is a mopey widower who writes a newspaper advice column and is soldiering on, raising his three daughters, two of whom are teenagers and are taking him for rides on their emotional roller coasters. Dan is disconnected, unable to respond to everyone’s suggestion that he move on, try to find someone, and look for love.

At the annual family get-together Dan takes a drive into town and meets Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore. The two hit it off, have coffee, and Dan feels the first stirrings of romance since his wife died four years earlier. He gets her number, heads back to the house, and discovers — wait for it — that Marie the one true love of his brother, played by Dane Cook. Complications ensue.

Frankly, some of the ambivilance about this movie have to rest on Carell. Take another look at that promotional poster, shown here. Carell is facing the camera, using a stack of syrupy pancakes for a pillow. His face is an utter blank.

Get used to that look.

Carell is an emotionally distant presence on the screen. Much like his suicidal character in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Dan is suffering in silence, needing to be pulled back in the game. Here, he winces and sighs, but rarely lets us in.

He has an odd comic talent. The trailer from the movie, where he is stopped by a cop and Carell says, “Put it on my bill,” gets laughs, but what’s the joke? When you see the whole movie, that line has no more context than it does in the 30 clip. It’s just an odd, off-the-wall thing to say to a cop.

Nor does the film go out of its way to make him appealing. When he sits down at dinner with the family, including his brother and Marie, he goes on a long, unpleasant rant about all the women Cook’s character has brought home. The family forgives him, apparently because he’s hurting, but if this were a drama about two Irish brothers in New York, there would have fisticuffs and blood oaths.

Binoche was a daring choice for the love interest. She’s not California sunshine beautiful, which would have been out of place, but she’s not drop dead gorgeous either. She’s seems to change over the movie, becoming warmer and lovelier. And, most of all, she’s a exactly the kind of woman, smart and seasoned, that Dan would be attracted to.

And that’s the problem. Carell is fine as the emotionally blocked dad. But once he has to break out of shell, he’s still that deadpan comic from “Thirty Year Old Virgin.” Liven up the pan, Steve. We need to see that you are in there. Even the script recognizes it. Dan’s big reveal to Marie comes when he sings to her in a family hootnanny.

In some ways the film is saved by the lesser characters. The three daughters of Carell’s character are a nice change from the usual TV sitcom airheads, particularly Allison Pill, as the oldest teenager. She has some of those old-beyond-her-years insights that parents of a teenager will recognize. Brittany Robertson, as the middle daughter, in the throes of her first true love, is appropriately selfish, mean, and vulnerable, all at once.

Cook, who is clearly being groomed to be a presence, doesn’t have much of one. He’s there, as Dan’s brother, but doesn’t get a memorable line or scene. Emily Blunt (“The Devil Wears Prada”) makes a lot out of a small role as Dan’s blind date, and Dianne Wiest has a nice turn (again) as a perceptive mother who sees what is really going on.

The problem may have been too much material. Some of the developments don’t carry through. A pointless side trip about Dan getting a syndication deal for his newspaper column not only goes nowhere, but when the representatives of the syndication group show up at the house, there’s an abrupt cut that drops them and the premise completely.

However, even impassive Carell manages to wring some genuine emotion from the conclusion. His youngest daughter makes him a card and he goes to the brink of tears — before pulling back of course. Still, the non-crabby viewers may find a lump forming in the throat. It may not be a love story for the ages, but at least in that moment it feels authentic, romantic, and real. What more can we ask?